As the speed meter shot over 170, she noticed a storm brewing on the horizon. There was a particular shade of gray, gainsboro, that never failed to take her back to memories of road trips in another time, another season.
They would have been driving for hours but as soon as the sun was shrouded in the shadowy affections of big, dark clouds, playing hide and seek with tall, dense trees; she would stir in the back seat, head resting on someone's lap or the other, and sit upright, delighted. She loved those road trips to distant places for the mystery of these moments. She loved to imagine the car with a flat tire; rain pouring so hard, it got difficult to drive; a fallen tree trunk, a blocked road - any number of reasons that would leave them stranded in the middle of nowhere, on narrow, dusty roads without any end in sight. When she would voice these fanciful thoughts, the fellow passengers would laugh nervously, for a moment playing along with her little fantasy, and light heartedly threaten to stop the car and let her out. As dutiful parents, they would follow the drill of questioning her on how she'd find her way back home, make her recite all the emergency numbers they had her memorized; never asking 'if' she wanted to be found. Maybe this was for fear she would reply in the negative, and they would have to ask themselves what they could have possibly done, to have raised such a curiously morbid child.
Twenty two years, later, some deep part of her soul still rumbled at gray skies and the pitter patter of the rain against the wind shield; her vacant emotions clambering over the ruins of loud car rides, the nest of dawns that had flooded so many mornings, unfiltered and reach the place where the sun had no business in the sky. She would find herself jarringly, ungovernably emotional yet again, a deer in headlights. Such was her wasteful, indulgent relationship with the battered, terrible sky. The seductive allure of getting thoroughly lost, making the familiar strange again and walking on forever into the horizon.
They would have been driving for hours but as soon as the sun was shrouded in the shadowy affections of big, dark clouds, playing hide and seek with tall, dense trees; she would stir in the back seat, head resting on someone's lap or the other, and sit upright, delighted. She loved those road trips to distant places for the mystery of these moments. She loved to imagine the car with a flat tire; rain pouring so hard, it got difficult to drive; a fallen tree trunk, a blocked road - any number of reasons that would leave them stranded in the middle of nowhere, on narrow, dusty roads without any end in sight. When she would voice these fanciful thoughts, the fellow passengers would laugh nervously, for a moment playing along with her little fantasy, and light heartedly threaten to stop the car and let her out. As dutiful parents, they would follow the drill of questioning her on how she'd find her way back home, make her recite all the emergency numbers they had her memorized; never asking 'if' she wanted to be found. Maybe this was for fear she would reply in the negative, and they would have to ask themselves what they could have possibly done, to have raised such a curiously morbid child.
Twenty two years, later, some deep part of her soul still rumbled at gray skies and the pitter patter of the rain against the wind shield; her vacant emotions clambering over the ruins of loud car rides, the nest of dawns that had flooded so many mornings, unfiltered and reach the place where the sun had no business in the sky. She would find herself jarringly, ungovernably emotional yet again, a deer in headlights. Such was her wasteful, indulgent relationship with the battered, terrible sky. The seductive allure of getting thoroughly lost, making the familiar strange again and walking on forever into the horizon.
“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
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